At Three Mile Island, the NRC screwed up in just about every way possible.

1) Early on, they came up with an idiotically brazen lie to avoid admitting that there had been any release. This lie, signed off by at least three of the Commissioners, was quickly exposed, but only after turning the event into national news.

2) The next day they claimed that, if the hydrogen bubble in the top of the Reactor Pressure Vessel expanded too far, it would interfere with the reactor cooling. At best, this showed gross incompetence. The B&W reactor pressure vessel (RPV) has a ring of check valves near the top of the RPV which would vent the hydrogen to the RPV annulus if the bubble got down that far.

3) The following day on the basis of a calculation that was off by a actor of 100 and a misinterpreted measurement, and with no attempt to confirm either with the NRC guys on site, NRC-DC called Pennsylvania Governor Thornburgh and recommended evacuation up to 10 miles downwind. Harold Denton, the NRC employee who made the decision later said: ``my sole objective was to minimize the radiation exposure to the public. I did not give any weight to whatever hardship evacuation might cause”.\cite{walker-2004}[p 126] Fortunately, Thornburgh who was talking to the people at the plant did not follow Denton’s recommendation.1

4) Later in the day, the NRC said that a meltdown was unlikely, but possible. The reactor had melted down two days earlier.

5) That evening, when everything was calming down, and the hydrogen bubble in the RPV was expertly but slowly being squeezed down by the reactor operators, an NRC employee, almost certainly Dr. Roger Mattson, Director of Systems Safety, went to an AP reporter demanding anonymity, and told him the bubble in the the RPV could explode within two days. This bombshell sent seasoned war correspondents and over 100,000 locals into panicked evacuation. The local Bishop was so sure his flock was about to be annihilated he declared General Absolution.

An explosion in the RPV was impossible due to the lack of oxygen, which was obvious to any competent nuclear engineer. A Chicago Tribune reporter, who was part of the ‘night of terror’, later correctly called it a “a hoax, a fumbling miscalculation by one of the NRC’s masters of technology,”

Figure 1. The 2.5 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for just over 350 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That’s $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. They took about 6 years to build. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2 electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. Oconee’s average capacity factor over the last 5 years was 98.2%. All three of these reactors have been licensed into the 2050’s, a gift from the Greatest Generation. Oconee and its cooling pond Lake Keowee have turned a depressed part of western South Carolina into a second home and tourist magnet.

Nuclear power in the West is a disastrously expensive mess. Table 1 shows where we are. Current builds have capital costs that are more than ten times higher than Oconee and her sisters. Only the wealthiest nations can afford these kind of costs, and then only sporadically. The construction times are such that there is no way nuclear can put a dent in global warming, or anything else. And it keeps getting worse. If this is the way things must be, nuclear power is a dead end, and rightly so. //

Yet in 2015, the German utility RWE commissioned their Eemshaven plant in the northeast corner of Holland at a cost of 2.2 billion euros. This is a little under $1500/kW for a 2 by 800 MW plant, or just under $2000/kW in 2024 dollars. This is for the latest and greatest ultra-super-critical plant meeting stringent EU pollution limits, sited in one of the most expensive places to build on the planet. The rule of thumb is $500/kW for the turbine hall and switchgear. The rest is fuel handling, the boiler, and pollution control. //

Figure 4. Fuel for 1 GW plant for one day. The coal plant’s fuel requires a 70 car train. The nuclear plant’s fuel fits in a two gallon jug. Newcastle 6700 is a good coal. Most coal’s are worse. //

A 1 GW nuclear, Figure 5, plant will burn about 82 kg’s of fuel per day, producing the same amount of solid waste. That’s about 100,000 times less than a coal plant. The coal yard and the coal receiving terminal disappear, as do the dryers and pulverizers. The nuke’s Fission Island volume will be smaller than the coal plant’s boiler. The turbine hall will be slightly larger. There will no stack gas handling equipment, no massive Forced Draft and Induced Draft fans, no SCR, no baghouses, no scrubbers, no massive stack. The ash landfill and slurry pond will be replaced by less than an acre of 5.9m(19 ft) high by 3.5m(11 ft) diameter casks. The nuclear plant should be cheaper to build with far cheaper fuel costs. //

Figure 15. Coal should be easy to beat

The reason why it is not is a tragically misdirected, autocratic regulatory system. We give an omnipotent regulator final approval of any nuclear power plant, and judge him on his ability to prevent a release of radiation. He gets no credit for the cheap, pollution-free, CO2-free, on-demand, power generated by a successful plant, nor the avoided mortality and morbidity that would have resulted if the plant had not been built. But he owns any problems. The regulator responds accordingly; and, since he has the final say, it’s his incentives, not society’s, that determines what happens. NRC Chairman Hendrie put it succinctly “The NRC’s responsibility is [nuclear] safety without regard to economic and social costs.” [Joseph Hendrie, NRC Chairman, 1979] The NRC’s definition of nuclear safety is preventing a release.

Figure 16. Hinkley Point tombstone.
No. Human welfare is our overriding priority.

This auto-genocidal myopia produces technical stagnation, a demoralized workforce, lack of competition, and shoddy quality. The end result is nuclear power that costs five or more times what it should-cost and build times that are three or more times longer than they need be. This in turn means nuclear is replaced by far more harmful technologies. It means nuclear can never be cheaper than the competition, which means humanity is far poorer than it could be. The greatest health hazard of all is poverty.

A blogger, Destin, talked TVA into letting him film the refueling process at Browns Ferry in Alabama. Browns Ferry is a three unit boiling water reactor plant. The design is essentially the same as the reactors at Fukushima. The hour and 45 minute video is overly long; and Destin’s narration can be a little grating at times; but overall he does a great job. It’s worth your time.

We also get a pretty good feeling for the plant’s safety culture. //

much of the video is taken up by Destin’s going through various check points, each manned by 3 or 4 people sitting around watching screens. While there are scores of people on the refueling floor, only a handful seem to be actually doing something to the plant. The actual shifting of the fuel bundles is done by a three person team, and is largely automated. At one point, a lady berates Destin’s guide who outranks her for letting Destin walk down a stairs facing forward. The stairs were narrower and steeper than normal. The rule is you have to treat it like a ladder.

Destin is told not to step on the floor drains. The problem is the moisture might contaminate his shoes, and set off alarms. The radiation in the drain is not from the plant. It’s normal background, naturally occurring radon and daughters. Nuclear plants don’t produce radon. On the way out, Destin’s camera fails to clear a check. So they disassemble the camera and put each piece into the detector separately, to allow the pieces out of the plant. Once again the source is background radon. //

On a positive note, TVA should be congratulated for allowing this visit. It should be commonplace. If I were king of the world, I’d have a glassed in viewing gallery, high in every reactor’s refueling space. During outages, I would invite everybody to walk through and get a look at what’s going on. Most of the people will come out as enthusiastic about nuclear as Destin.

The second 1974 Power Engineering article that Nick Touran has uncovered is Senior Editor Olds’ discussion of the massive jumps in power plant capital costs between 1965 and 1974 Power Plant Capital Costs Going Out of Sight.

The AEC required plant owners to report their estimate of the capital cost of any nuclear plants under construction, and update those estimates annually. Olds’ article is largely based on that data. All his dollar figures are in nominal dollars, the dollar of that year.

Figure 2. USA fossil plant costs bottomed out in 1966.

The paper is graced by a number of hand drawn, beautifully lettered graphics. Figure 2 shows that prior to 1967 fossil plant capital costs were falling reaching a low of $100/kW in nominal dollars in 1966. But in 1967, the cost jumped nearly 20% to $118. Unfortunately, Old does not take the fossil figures any further forward. But if he did he would see that 20% per year escalation continue unabated through 1974, Figure 3. //

Thanks to nuclear’s factor of 100,000 advantage in energy density over fossil, a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, was working its way down a steep learning curve, and in 1967 was fully competitive with coal, when coal was as cheap as it ever was. Nuclear was insulated from both oil price and fossil pollution regulation.

But in 1967, a new omnipotent player emerged. In 1954, Congress had given the AEC complete and unfettered control over nuclear, both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. As Truman put it, atom power was “too important to be made the subject of profiteering”. The AEC had to both implement Mutually Assured Destruction, and promote and regulate nuclear power. The first responsibility included making sure everybody was petrified of the bomb.

Currently, by far the best Free World reactor is the Korean APR1400. The Korean’s can build an APR1400 for less than $3000/kW in Korea and have built four in the UAE for around $4500/kW. The APR1400 was our best, maybe only, hope for leading Western nuclear out of a prohibitively expensive regulatory morass.

The APR1400 is based on the Combustion Engineering (CE) System 80+ design, the best of the American PWR’s. In 1997, Kepco licensed that design. The Koreans demanded and got a Total Technology Transfer Agreement. No strings attached. They could use the IP anyway they wanted. CE’s back was against the wall. The tort lawyers had embroiled CE in an asbestos suit and they were going bankrupt. The cash from the Koreans kept CE alive for another couple of years. In 2000, Westinghouse acquired CE and became the licensor.

Westinghouse’s offering is the AP1000. The AP1000 is a cramped, nearly unmaintainable reactor which will cost you somewhere around $15,000/kW. Westinghouse knows it can’t compete with the APR1400. So Westinghouse has colluded with the DOE to prevent the Koreans from exporting the APR1400 from Korea. Westinghouse may have lousy engineers but they’ve got great lawyers.

On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. That company is most widely recognized as being financially backed by Bill Gates, but it’s attempting to build a radically new reactor, one that is sodium-cooled and incorporates energy storage as part of its design.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will gain approval to operate the reactor, but it’s a critical step for the company.

The TerraPower design, which it calls Natrium and has been developed jointly with GE Hitachi, has several novel features. Probably the most notable of these is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. This allows the primary coolant to circulate at far lower pressure, avoiding any of the challenges posed by the high-pressure water or steam used in water-cooled reactors. But it carries the risk that sodium is highly reactive when exposed to air or water. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, which could allow it to consume some isotopes that would otherwise end up as radioactive waste in more traditional reactor designs.

The reactor is also relatively small compared to most current nuclear plants (345 megawatts versus roughly 1 gigawatt), and incorporates energy storage. Rather than using the heat extracted by the sodium to boil water, the plant will put the heat into a salt-based storage material that can either be used to generate electricity or stored for later use. This will allow the plant to operate around renewable power, which would otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system will also allow it to temporarily output up to 500 MW of electricity. //

1Zach1 Ars Praefectus
8y
3,745
Subscriptor
bumppo said:
It sounds like a mechanism to avoid selling power during the point in the day that solar has driven the price down (potentially into negative territory), while preserving the ability to sell most of that power later.

It would be interesting to know how long the storage is designed to sustain that elevated, up-to-500 MW output.
Here are their plans detailed https://www.terrapower.com/downloads/Natrium-Technology.pdf

Power Output – EnergyStorage System100-500 MWe+ for 5.5+ hours, power ramping at 10% per minute

Why clean power is about people, not sacrifice //

We tend to talk about energy as if it’s a niche technical problem; something for engineers, utilities, and climate wonks to argue about at conferences. I’ve been guilty of this myself, spending time discussing reactor designs when I should have been talking about the people and institutions that actually do the reacting. Megawatts, grids, emissions targets, and levelised costs all matter, but they’re not the whole story, and simply not part of the broader story that appeals to most people. Energy isn’t just an input into the economy; it’s the thing that sets everything else in motion. It’s the backbone of civilisation. It’s the foundation of modern human flourishing. Hence, energy is life.

This becomes obvious the moment you look at the data. Wherever reliable electricity shows up, a familiar pattern follows, of higher literacy, lower child mortality, higher incomes, better health outcomes, and more education for women. That’s not ideology, but correlation after correlation, across countries and decades. Energy access doesn’t always guarantee prosperity, but the absence of it certainly guarantees poverty.

It’s also worth remembering something that news headlines rarely emphasise: by almost every measurable metric, including life expectancy, child survival, poverty reduction, and education, the world is far better than it was a century ago. That progress didn’t happen by accident, but because we learned how to produce vast amounts of cheap, reliable energy, and because human societies reacted by building everything else on top of it. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Energy powers clean water systems, hospitals, vaccines, heating, lighting, refrigeration, agriculture, and the internet. Take energy away, and modern life quickly starts to fall apart.

And yet. Hundreds of millions of people still have no access to electricity at all. Billions cook with solid fuels that damage their lungs. Even in rich countries, people die every winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly. These aren’t lifestyle choices, but the consequence of political choices that enable energy shortages.

Psychologists have known for decades that humans are bad at judging risk. We overestimate dramatic, low-probability dangers and underestimate slow, high-probability harms, through a mix of availability bias and negativity bias. This bias has real consequences. Nuclear accidents loom large in the public imagination, even though, measured per unit of electricity produced, nuclear energy is far safer the alternatives.

As I have said before, the uncomfortable consequence is that fear of nuclear energy has often caused more harm than nuclear energy itself.

The front cover is a shot of the 2.55 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for 356 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That is $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2, electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. These plants and their sisters have operated for over 60 years, harming exactly nobody from radiation. They are licensed to operate intothe 2050’s.

Between 1970 and 2025, technological progress should have reduced the real cost of nuclear power. Instead the current cost of nuclear plants in Europe and North America is more than $15,000/kW, more than 13 times the cost of Oconee. Thanks to its insane energy density, nuclear power should consume far less of the planet’s precious resources than any other source of electricty while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2. Instead nuclear is a prohibitively expensive flop.

This little book explains why this auto-genocidal tragedy happened, and what we can do about it. Nuclear’s problems are entirely man-made. What is man-made can be man-unmade. If we adopt the regulatory reforms that this book lays out, the providers of nuclear power will be forced to compete with each other and new entrants on a level playing field, in which case the inherent cheapness of fission power combined with technological advances will push the cost of nuclear electricity back down to its should-cost.

Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio
·
On February 5, 2026, the New START Treaty expired. Negotiated at a different time to meet a different challenge, New START no longer serves its purpose. Our desire to reduce global nuclear threats is genuine, but we will not accept terms that harm the United States or ignore Show more
7:01 AM · Feb 6, 2026 //

This treaty, in today's current environment, has the sole purpose of limiting the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It controls the number of ballistic missile submarines, strategic bombers, and silo-based ICBMs we have. We can't test new nuclear weapons designs or validate the quality of our existing stockpile. Most importantly, it ignores the existence of China. It really makes no sense for us to make a treaty with what amounts to a failed state simply to boost Putin's ego, when our real threat, China, is free to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems and test them at will.

The GKG Twin Blessing course comprises 8 lectures, although the last is optional, and the first may not be needed for some audiences. It could be given in a single day seminar, or, in an academic environment, in 7 or 8 separate lectures.

New nuclear capacity won’t show up until around 2030

Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters.

Facebook's parent company says it has inked agreements with three outfits - TerraPower and Oklo are developing new reactor technology or building fresh sites, while Vistra is supporting existing nuclear plants. All three will deliver electricity into the grid rather than straight to Meta's own facilities.

The hidden costs of powering civilization //

I want to ask you a question we don’t usually think about when we flip a light switch or fill up a tank…and that is, where does the energy actually come from?

Sure, sunlight, wind, and even coal and gas are technically free, they are energy sources just sitting there in nature to be used… some facing more limitations than others. But turning them into power we can actually use to run Santa Claus’ chocolate factory or light our christmas trees? That’s a whole different story.

This is where the idea of primary energy comes in. It’s actually not about the electricity we see listed on our bills, but is really about all the raw energy we have to pull from nature, to process, convert, and deliver before we get anything useful, such as 24/7/365 electricity, every single second we need it. And once you start looking at energy this way, things get a lot clearer.

We often hear that solar and wind energy is “clean” and basically “free” and it does not have thermal losses like a nuclear or gas-fired power plant. But to make this wind and solar energy usable and reliable in the real world, we have to build enormous support systems, mine rare minerals, manufacture components, build storage, upgrade the grid, maintain everything, and then, eventually, dispose of it. It’s not just about a solar panel and a little breeze blowing over a turbine blade.

Now compare that to conventional fuels like coal or gas or oil… they might lose more energy during combustion in power plants or engines, but the upfront infrastructure is simpler, and the systems last much longer, with the average coal or gas plant running for a good 30-60 years, nuclear usually far longer. That is not nothing and this should be considered when speaking of “free” energy.

Understanding primary energy helps cut through the feel-good stats and get down to the physics. It assists in showing us the full cost of electricity (FCOE), time, money and materials used in making any source truly usable…and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

That is why looking at the real problem with the “Primary Energy Fallacy” often used by supporters of grid-scale wind and solar, is worth it! //

The “Primary Energy Fallacy” a term coined eloquently by many, is the idea that all primary energy from fossil fuels must be replaced by an equivalent amount of “renewable” energy. However, those people say, this would not be necessary because more than two-thirds of primary energy is lost as wasted heat during the conversion processes.

The misunderstanding occurs in the belief that wind and solar generate electricity without any losses (a secondary or tertiary form of energy) while coal, gas, uranium may have a high energy content but have “thermal losses” ~60-70% during processing. This PE fallacy argument is used for power generation and also for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) in a slightly adjusted form.

• Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 1: “The conversion of gas and coal to power results in a loss of around 60%. This means that one unit of primary energy from wind or solar, replaces two units of that of gas/coal”
• Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 2: “The conversion losses during end use in internal combustions engines ICE are also high. Electric motors are much more efficient. Most car engines ‘lose’ 70% of fuel energy, which means that one final energy unit of electricity replaces three units of gasoline/diesel”

The late, great Dr. Petr Beckmann was editor of the great journal Access to Energy, founder of the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further Beckmann info here; further dissident physics links), author of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (Amazon; PDF version) and the pamphlets The Non-Problem of Nuclear Waste and Why “Soft” Technology Will Not Be America’s Energy Salvation. (See also my post Access to Energy (archived comments), and this post.)

I just came across another favorite piece of his and have scanned it in: Economics as if Some People Mattered (review of Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher), first published in Reason (October 1978), and reprinted in Free Minds & Free Markets: Twenty-Five Years of Reason (1993). Those (including some libertarians and fellow travelers) who also have a thing for “smallness” and bucolic pastoralism should give this a read.

Small is Beautiful is the title of a book by E.F. Schumacher. It is also a slogan describing a state of mind in which people clamor for the rural idyll that (they think) comes with primitive energy sources, small-scale production, and small communities. Yet much–perhaps most–of their clamor is not really for what they consider small and beautiful; it is for the destruction of what they consider big and ugly.

… The free market does not, of course, eradicate human greed, but it directs it into channels that the consumer the maximum benefit, for it is he who benefits from the competition of”profit-greedy” businessmen. The idea that the free market is highly popular among businessmen is one that is widespread, but not among sound economists. It was not very popular in 1776, when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published, and it has not become terribly popular with all of them since–which is not surprising, for the free market benefits the consumer but disciplines the businessman.

If the free market is so popular with business, what are all those business lobbies doing in Washington? The shipping lobby wants favors for U.S. ships; the airlines yell rape and robbery when deregulation from the governmental CAB cartel threatens; the farmers’ lobby clamors for more subsidies. What all these lobbies are after is not a freer market but a bigger nipple on the federal sow.

Petr Beckmann

• Hammer and Tickle Hammer and Tickle $ 12.00
• The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear $ 15.00
• Access to Energy - 5 Volume Set Access to Energy - 5 Volume Set $ 199.00
• Fancy Napkin Foldings Fancy Napkin Foldings $ 8.00
• Musical Musings Musical Musings $ 20.00
• A History of Pi A History of Pi $ 16.00
• The Non-problem of Nuclear Waste The Non-problem of Nuclear Waste $ 8.00
• Orthogonal Polynomials for Engineers and Physicists Orthogonal Polynomials for Engineers and Physicists $ 39.00
• Radiation by an Antenna With Non-Gaussian Phase Errors Radiation by an Antenna With Non-Gaussian Phase Errors $ 8.00
• Electromagnetic Feilds and VDT-itis Electromagnetic Feilds and VDT-itis $ 8.00
• The Radiation Bogey The Radiation Bogey $ 8.00

Illuminating lecture by the late, great Petr Beckmann. For more on Beckmann, see my posts:

• Access to Energy (archived comments);
• A Basic Physics Reminder for Solar Energy Advocates;
• Beckmann’s Economics as if Some People Mattered, or, Small is Not Beautiful;
• Carson: Libertarians for Junk Science.

Most countries stopped testing nuclear weapons after they signed the global Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) starting from 1996. The treaty emerged amid growing concerns about human health and the environment above the ground, underground and underwater, from nuclear pollution.

The US conducted its first nuclear test in 1945. In all, the US has conducted 1,032 nuclear tests, according to the United Nations. The US last tested nuclear weapons in 1992. It signed the CTBT in 1996 but never ratified it.

The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests, the last of them in 1990. Since the USSR’s dissolution in 1990, Russia – which inherited the former superpower’s nuclear arsenal – has not conducted any nuclear tests. In 1996, Russia signed the CTBT, ratifying it in 2000. But Putin revoked Russia’s ratification of the treaty in 2023.

China last tested nuclear weapons in 1996. //

France last tested nuclear weapons in 1996. It conducted 210 tests between 1945 and 1996.

The United Kingdom conducted 45 nuclear tests from 1952, with the last one conducted in 1991.

Since the CTBT came into effect, 10 nuclear tests have taken place.

In 1998, India and Pakistan conducted two nuclear tests each. India and Pakistan have never signed the CTBT.

According to the UN, North Korea has conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017. It conducted two tests in 2016. North Korea has also not signed the CTBT.

Nine states have nuclear arms, including the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

For decades, Israel has maintained nuclear ambiguity, also known as “opacity”. It has never publicly confirmed or denied the presence of its nuclear weapons programme.

adiation. Should I be concerned about it? Is it safe? Is it harmful? How do I know when it is okay and when it isn’t? Some people say it is nothing to be concerned about, but others say even a little is too much—what should I believe?

We all have questions about radiation and it isn’t easy to sort through the available material to find answers. Sometimes the information is too technical or it is too hard to find just the answer you’re looking for. The purpose of the information on this Web site is to help you find answers quickly and easily.

The radiation warning symbol should not be confused with the civil defense symbol designed to identify fallout shelters. For more information about the latter, view the collection item Civil Defense Fallout Shelter Sign.

Radiation Warning Symbol (Trefoil)
Radiation warning symbol

The civil defense symbol for a fallout shelter consists of a circle divided into six sections, three black and three yellow. The general form is very similar to the above however there is no central circle. The Office of Civil Defense originally intended fallout shelters to use the radiation warning symbol with the circle in the center and the three blades, but this idea was rejected because a fallout shelter represents safety whereas the radiation warning symbol represents a hazard.

The three-bladed radiation warning symbol, as we currently know it, was "doodled" out at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley sometime in 1946 by a small group of people. This event was described in a letter written in 1952 by Nels Garden, head of the Health Chemistry Group at the Radiation Laboratory: "A number of people in the group took an interest in suggesting different motifs, and the one arousing the most interest was a design which was supposed to represent activity radiating from an atom."

The first signs printed at Berkeley had a magenta (Martin Senour Roman Violet No. 2225) symbol on a blue background. In an earlier letter written in 1948, Garden explained why this particular shade of magenta color was selected: "it was distinctive and did not conflict with any color code that we were familiar with. Another factor in its favor was its cost... The high cost will deter others from using this color promiscuously." Explaining the blue background, he said, "The use of a blue background was selected because there is very little blue color used in most of the areas where radioactive work would be carried out." //

Despite Garden's view to the contrary, most workers felt that a blue background was a poor choice. Blue was not supposed to be used on warning signs, and it faded, especially outdoors. The use of yellow was standardized at Oak Ridge National Lab in early 1948. At that time, Bill Ray and George Warlick, both working for K.Z. Morgan, were given the task of coming up with a more suitable warning sign, a blue background being too unacceptable. Ray traveled to Berkeley and picked up a set of their signs. Back in Oak Ridge, Ray and Warlick had their graphics people cut out the magenta symbols and staple them on cards of different colors. Outdoors, and at a distance of 20 feet, a committee selected the magenta on yellow as the best combination.

The Office of Civil Defense originally intended fallout shelters to use the radiation warning symbol (yellow background with a magenta circle in the center of three magenta blades) but this idea was rejected because a fallout shelter represents safety whereas the radiation warning symbol represents a hazard. The above version of the national fallout shelter sign was introduced to the public by the Defense Department on December 1, 1961. It was intended to only be used with federally approved shelters. Unlike this example, these signs often had yellow arrows below the words "fallout shelter" to indicate the direction to the shelter. In 1962, contracts were negotiated for the production of 400,000 aluminum outdoor signs and one million steel signs for indoors.

The document concentrates accurate information about radiation into a a tri-fold that can be read and understood in just a few minutes. It is a valuable presentation handout, would be a useful addition to the material offered in doctor’s offices, and should be a part of any classroom discussion about radiation.

Robert Hargraves, who has lived a life of achievement including writing a well received book titled Thorium: Energy Cheaper than Coal, founding a business, serving as Chief Information Officer for Boston Scientific, serving as an assistant professor and associate director of the computation center at Dartmouth College, publishing numerous peer-reviewed articles on a variety of topics and earning a PhD in Physics from Brown University, researched and produced “Radiation: The Facts” as a “labor of love”.

Hargraves tapped a deep pool of expertise by requesting reviews and comments from his extensive contact list that includes radiation biologists, health physics professionals, and nuclear engineers. Though space on a brochure is obviously limited, Robert has provided the references supporting the statements on the brochure on his web site and given creative commons license for others to republish his work.